We vivons-a-credit

Living on credit when it comes to finance is risking bankruptcy. We can recover from bankruptcy. When it comes to ecological balances, the chances of restoring health are slim…

Yet humanity has lived on credit for thirty years, taking more than it can give or renew. And these are not figures made by illuminated ecologists, but figures that are still too optimistic. This has been demonstrated by the more recent corrective studies, provided in particular by the very serious Swiss Offices for the Environment, Territorial Development and Cooperation. The first calculations had omitted some pollutant impacts, the need to preserve untapped spaces, the crucial problem of water management, etc.

The ecological failure that is preparing should set the whole world on the brink of war. Or rather at work, before wars come to sign famines and resource conflicts. Many abuses will be irreversible, or will require centuries to return to normal. Our children and grandchildren will pay for it.

It is not the few pro-environmental measures our governments are taking that will prevent the disaster. As long as populations remain large or increase, the simple arithmetic shows that ecological debt will increase to the point of increasing areas of non-return. More arable land, more fresh water, more forests and plankton to make our oxygen, more energy, more minerals, more landfills, a polluted biosphere at all levels soon transformed into a thanatosphere…

The only solution is to start paying back already wasted credits as soon as possible, multiplying pro-environmental technologies as quickly as possible. A general movement has already been set up, largely supported (or exploited) by the media, and we can rejoice. Above all, hope that it can efficiently stop the pollution machine.

But it must be kept in mind that these commendable efforts will be far from solving the underlying problem. Even if they succeed in imposing themselves on a global scale, they will only delay the fatal outcome. As long as the number of consumers increases, as it happens at high speed with the contamination of the Third World by the way of life of the Old and the New, and independantsly by the effect of the current birth rates, the debt will only increase and the ecology simmer.

It remains to be found a way of limiting births sufficiently radically to avoid bankruptcy and without resorting to coercion. Because coercion, faced with an instinct as powerful as the instinct of reproduction, could have unpredictable rebound effects. The only gentle solution: try to understand why human sexuality leads to the current situation and, with a little luck: discover the causes of an abnormal multiplication of fertilizations…